Elizabeth George - A Suitable Vengeance

'Like the princess and the pea,' Lady Helen said. 'Did you ever have to sleep there, Daze?'

'Great-Grandmamma was alive when I first came here for a visit. So instead of sleeping in the bed one had to spend several hours sitting next to it, reading from the Bible. She was quite a devotee of some of the more lurid passages in the Old Testament, as I recall. Extensive explorations into Sodom and Gomorrah. Sexual misbehaviour. Lust and salacity. She wasn't very interested in how God punished the sinners, however. "Leave 'em to the Lord," she'd say and wave a hand at me. "Get on with it, girl.'"

'Did you get on with it?' Sidney asked.

'Of course. I was only sixteen. I don't think I'd ever read anything so delicious in my life.' She laughed engagingly. 'I count the Bible as largely responsible for the sinful life-' Her eyes suddenly dropped. Her quick smile faded, then reappeared in a determined fashion. 'Do you remember your great-grandmother, Tommy?'

Lynley was concentrating on his wineglass, on his inability to define colour in a liquid that existed somewhere between green and amber. He made no reply.

Deborah's hand touched his, a contact so fleeting it might not have happened at all. 'When I saw that bed, I wondered how gauche it would be if I slept on the floor,' she said.

'One does somehow expect the entire affair to come creeping to life directly after nightfall,' Lady Helen said. 'But I long to sleep there anyway. I always have. Why have I never been allowed to spend the night in that terrifying bed?'

'It wouldn't be too horrible if one didn't have to sleep there alone.' Sidney raised an eyebrow at Justin Brooke. 'A second body to comfort one. A warm body, that is. Even more preferably a live one. If Great-Grandmamma Asherton's taken to wandering the halls, I'd prefer she not drop in to keep me warm, thank you. But as for any of the rest of you – just knock twice.'

'Some more welcome than others, I hope,' Justin Brooke said.

'Only if they behave themselves,' Sidney replied.

St James looked from his sister to her lover, saying nothing. He reached for a roll, broke it neatly in half.

'This is obviously what comes of discussing the Old Testament over lunch,' Lady Helen said. 'A mere mention of Genesis and we become a group of reprobates.'

The company's answering laughter got them through the moment.

Lynley watched them walk off in separate directions. Sidney and Deborah went towards the house where the former, learning that Deborah had brought her cameras, had announced she would change into something seductive to inspire Deborah to new photographic heights; St James and Lady Helen sauntered towards the gatehouse and the open park beyond it; Lady Asherton and Cotter headed off together towards the north-east side of the house where, sheltered by a grove of beech and lime trees, the little chapel of St Petroc housed Lynley's father and the rest of the Asherton dead; and Justin Brooke murmured vaguely about finding a tree under which to doze, a statement that Sidney pooh-poohed with a wave of her hand.

Within moments, Lynley was alone. A fresh breeze caught the edge of the tablecloth. He fingered the linen, moved a plate to one side, and regarded the ruins of the meal.

He had an obligation to see John Penellin after such a long absence. The estate manager would expect it of him. He would no doubt be waiting for him in the office, ready to go over the books and examine the accounts. Lynley dreaded their meeting. The dread had nothing to do with the possibility that Penellin might bring up Peter's condition and Lynley's own responsibility to do something about it. Nor did the dread reflect a lack of interest in the life of the estate. The true difficulty lay in what both concern and interest implied: a return, however brief, to Howenstow.

Lynley's absence this time had been inordinately long, nearly six months. He was honest enough with himself to know what it was that he was avoiding by coming to Howenstow so seldom. It was exacdy what he had been avoiding for so many years either by not coming at all or by bringing with him a troop of friends, as if life in Cornwall were a 1930s garden-party with himself at the centre, laughing and talking and pouring champagne. This engagement weekend was no different in design from any trip he had made to Cornwall in the last fifteen years. He had merely used the excuse of surrounding Deborah and her father with familiar faces so that he himself would not have to meet alone the one face in his own life that he couldn't bear to see. He hated that thought at the very same time as he knew that his stormy relationship with his mother somehow had to be laid to rest during this weekend.

He didn't know how to do it. Every word she said – no matter how innocuous she intended it to be – merely served as a dredge, uprooting emotions he did not want to feel, producing memories he wanted to avoid, demanding actions he did not possess the humility or the courage to take. Pride was at issue between them, along with anger and guilt and the need to blame. Intellectually, he knew that his father would have died anyway. But he had never been able to accept that simple maxim. Far easier to believe that a person and not a disease had killed him. For one could blame a person. And he needed to blame.

Sighing, he pushed himself to his feet. From where he was on the lawn, he could see that the blinds in the estate office had been drawn against the afternoon sun. But he had no doubt John Penellin was waiting behind them, expecting him to act out the role of eighth Asherton earl, no matter how little it was to his liking. He walked towards the house.

The estate office had been placed with an eye to its purpose. Situated on the ground floor across from the smoking-room and abutting the billiard room, its location made it accessible to members of the household as well as to tenants come to pay their rent.

In no way did the room suggest ostentation. Green-edged hemp matting, rather than carpet, did duty as surface upon the floor. Paint, not panelling or paper, covered the walls upon which hung old estate photographs and maps. From a plain ceiling, iron chains supported two white-shaded light-fixtures. Beneath them, simple pine shelves held decades of record-books, a few atlases, half a dozen journals. The filing cabinets in the corner were oak, battered from generations of use, as were the desk and the swivel chair behind it. In this chair at the moment, however, sat not John Penellin who conducted much of his business from the estate office. Instead a thin figure occupied his accustomed place, huddling as if cold, her cheek resting upon her palm.

As Lynley reached the open door, he saw that it was Nancy Cambrey in her father's chair. She was playing restlessly with a container of pencils, and although her presence instead of her father's gave Lynley the excuse he needed to be on his way and to put off his meeting with Penellin indefinitely he found that he hesitated at the sight of the man's daughter.

Nancy was very much changed. Her hair, once a brown streaked with gold that shimmered in the light, had lost most of its shine and all of its beauty. It hung drearily round her face without style, grazing the tops of her shoulders. Her skin, once blushing and smooth with a cast of freckles making an endearing bandit's mask across nose and on cheeks, had become quite pallid. It looked thicker somehow, the way skin in a portrait looks if an artist adds an unnecessary layer of varnish and in doing so destroys the effect of youth and beauty he was trying to create. Everything about Nancy Cambrey suggested just that sort of destruction. She looked faded, used up, overwashed, overworn.

This extended to her clothes. A shapeless house-dress replaced the trendy skirts, jerseys and boots she once had worn. But even the dress was several sizes too large and it hung upon her loosely, much like a smock but without a smock's style. It was too old to be a piece of modern fashion and, together with Nancy's appearance, the dress made Lynley hesitate, made him frown. Although he was seven years her senior, he'd known Nancy Cambrey all of her life, liked her as well. The change was troubling.